Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the UN's going to take over' - well, they're beginning to have a case.

Like the battleships of old, omnibus programs present too tempting a target, too easily destroyed by a single attack, to make it through a fight.... It is through incremental change after change, step after step, that a statesman of today can vindicate a bold vision.

The reapportionment of 2002 designed congressional districts that favored incumbents of both parties, leaving virtually no room for challengers to be elected. Of 435 members of the House of Representatives, only four incumbents lost to nonincumbents of the other party. In all, 96 percent of incumbents were re-elected. (It was only 90 percent in 1992 and 1982 after the previous reapportionments.)

We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden - a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.

The key to controlling your own political party, so that it does not eat you alive, is to realize that while Democratic and Republican leaders differ sharply, their voters do not.

The problem: Democrats have to drop their stupid class-warfare rhetoric. With 74 million Americans owning stock in one form or another, anything which helps them can't be derided as a sop to the rich.

The stagnation of the Japanese economy in the past 20 years is eloquent testimony to the fact that government usually gets it wrong. Sometimes it makes the wrong decision because it fails to anticipate the market (as Japan did when it downplayed laptop computers and stressed mainframes).